Yahoo! Media Event: ‘Making Flickr Awesome Again’ with 1TB Storage

By Tiernan Ray

Yahoo! (YHOO) CEO Marissa Mayer is holding court at 2 Times Square in New York, where the topic is “How we can make Flickr awesome again,” referring to the company’s photo-sharing service.

Mayer offered some brief remarks about the morning’s announcement of its intended $1.1 billion acquisition of image-sharing service Tumblr. She then said the focus for the afternoon would be Flickr.

Quick stats: 89 million people on Flickr, sharing 8 billion images.

One requirement for “re-imagining”Flickr is full-resolution images, where the user interface has been redesigned to place the emphasis on pictures, not on text and links.

Second, the company is going to offer a terabyte of storage. The company said that compares favorably with the average photo storage offered by competitors of just 15 megabytes. Google‘s (GOOG)Picasso application, and its companion online storage, is one of Flickr’s many competitors, as is Facebook‘s (FB) Instagram.

Apple‘s (AAPL) iCloud could be considered a competitor, though in a somewhat different sense.

The new service is live tonight, the company said.

Mayer remarked that “none of your photos lose any of your quality. That’s something no one else offers.”

Mayer said if all the photos ever taken were uploaded to the Net, they would take up a total storage amount equal to only one tenth of the total storage space available to all users with the Flickr upgrade. “This is about lifetimes of photos,” said Mayer.

Asked about how Yahoo! will revive consciousness of a brand somewhat left by the wayside, Mayer said the company was going to actively promote Flickr, starting with having this evening bought space on 11 digital billboards in Times Square.

I had thought someone would ask about whether Yahoo! views current cellular upload speeds as an impediment to uploading full resolution images from a mobile device. But no one asked, and I was unfortunately too far from the mic to ask.

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.